Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Denis Lavant, perhaps best known as the chimp-faced fire-eating street urchin in Leos Carax's ethereal Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, is cast here as a troubled former Foreign Legionnaire, the backstory of his self-torment forming the bulk of the film. On service in Djibouti, in a unit caught in a stasis of drills, whoring and ablutions, Lavant's character takes umbrage at the rise of a new arrival, popular and heroic, into the affections of his commanding officer.
This is no war film, probably largely due to a female director more concerned with the mechanics of backbiting and jealousy in a hierarchical structure than with derring-do. Not a Kathryn Bigelow soldier piece, in other words. It's soon apparent that entire hyperreal scenes serve to create an atmosphere of homoeroticism through which we come to understand that Lavant's bitterness is wholly driven by his repressed sexuality.
The plot itself could be written on a handkerchief. Denis's intention was to create a visual poem, not a conventional linear feature. To this end, there are instances of a captivating marriage of image and soundtrack. Unfortunately, it also suffocates under the inertness and impotence of its protagonist: a portrait of self-denied obsession will always run the risk of shutting the viewer out.

5/10

Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008)

It's imperative for a historical biopic to bring something more to the table than just a straightforward retelling of events, when the eventual outcome is already well known. This becomes doubly vital if there's a loss of veracity with a change of language, and if there's any inkling that what we're getting is a vanity project, a star vehicle more than a dramatisation actually interested in the facts or participants.
It wasn't hard to suspect Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg, Hitler's would-be assassin, would fall prey to these failings. The usual boxes of the Hollywood WWII epic are ticked, of course: a rotation of British heavyweights as the top-ranking staff, a lot of terse secret rendezvouses and the obligatory sense of portentous urgency with a smattering of Wagner thrown in. But Cruise never really steps out of his dogged Mission: Impossible mode, with scowling and flashbacks filling in for character depth.

4/10

13 Tzameti (Géla Babluani, 2005)

A young builder overhears his employer planning to undertake 'one last job' before dying inadvertently and leaving him out of pocket for the work done. So, the callow youth assumes the boss's identity, unaware that he's heading into deep trouble with an underworld gambling ring revolving around Russian roulette.
Interestingly for cinematophiles, Babluani's film starts so fumblingly on a technical level before moving on to a surer-footed noir style that it's tempting to view this as possibly the first ever example of levels of competence in direction being used as a mirror of the protagonist's progression. There's also a detached Melvillesque nihilism to the dramatic arc which reassures you against patness.
However, 13 Tzameti doesn't have much to say beyond that, and Babluani might have well have admitted as much when he took the Yankee dollar five years later to remake it. With Jason Statham, bien sur.

5/10

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

Winding Refn may be best known as the director of the admirably uncompromising Pusher trilogy, which first brought him together with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor of formidable range and subtlety. For them to reunite to present an arthouse Conan the Barbarian is surely taking the piss.
Valhalla Rising, then is basically Lars Von Trier going straight into reworking The 13th Warrior to unwind from Antichrist. It's even divided into chapters with foreboding titles as Antichrist was. Mikkelsen's mute One Eye is a Viking era superhero kept in chains to fight without respite. A flaxen-haired waif attaches himself to the killing machine and then they're launched into a ill-conceived crusade with a band of Christians on a mission to convert heathens.
It is strong on atmosphere, particularly in some startlingly eerie photography and stiflingly disorientating setpieces. But it doesn't at any point really seem interested in injecting more thematic depth to the world it has visually managed to capture to an impressive degree, and hence leaves just disconnected moody images in the mind.

5/10

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2008)

As James Bond spends an inordinate amount of time underwater, so with Rambo and jungles. Stallone claimed that it took this long for another sequel because of having to find a worthy contemporary adversary. For that read: a contemporary jungle-based adversary.
So, Burma it is, with our by now unfeasibly ossified and mumbling hero reluctantly taking a bunch of do-gooders up river and before long showing all and sundry how wholescale slaughter is done, dressed up with Stallone's own brand of pensive aphorism ("Live for nothing, or die for something"). Meanwhile, with the Burmese Government forces serving only as target practice between bouts of cartoon villainy, the educational level of the enterprise is limited to revealing that where most soldiers merely die when hit, in Burma they actually explode into mush.

3/10

The Killing Room (Jonathan Liebesman, 2009)

Four disparate individuals are invited to a secret facility to take part in psychological testing of an increasingly disturbing nature, monitored all the while by hidden profilers.
I was hoping here for either a serious attempt to engage with the theme of the ruthlessness of unfettered governmental mindgames on guinea pigs, in the mould of Das Experiment - after all, just as that film was based on real events, so The Killing Room flippantly makes direct reference to the CIA's MKULTRA Cold War project. Failing that, turning the set-up into out-and-out survival mayhem a la Cube would have probably done the trick too. But Liebesman is a hack, and manages neither successfully. Chloë Sevigny and Peter Stormare, as the morally compromised testers, do play edgy cat-and-mouse for a while, but the eventual resolution is badly undermined by the weakness of the underlying premise.

4/10

Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (Shane Meadows, 2009)

A verite comedy this time from Meadows, shoestring in budget and shooting time even by his spartan standards, built almost wholly on improvisation from Paddy Considine playing up the bragging arsehole aspect of many of his characters in Meadows's films. What story there is involves loser Considine driving around the North, bigging himself and his blobby rap protege Scor-zay-zee up to anyone who'll listen, whilst trying to deal with impending fatherhood with his ex-girlfriend and whining at Meadows, who's following him to make a documentary. It's really just a pal exercise for the makers, no more than a middling TV comedy in substance, and depends heavily on Considine's ability to wring warmth out of the most hopeless saddoes for a sympathetic reception.

5/10